Miming in the Choir
by the anomaly
Summary: "We are not slaves; we are soldiers. You remember that." Finlay's experience of the war alternated with a single day of his post-war life. Warning: Torture, suicide, PTSD, drug references.


_Disclaimer: Not real, not mine, not making money from this._

* * *

_And if the waters grow not less  
Nor ever will,  
Of human sorrow, nobleness  
Is with us still,  
And here and there a sail of tenderness. _

- "The Mail-train, Crewe" by W.H. Auden

* * *

_Dear E.,_

_I have just caught the _ train to _ and have put up in a cabin by the sea. The weather is incredibly mellow. I spend the days by the beach, just sitting in the sand, watching the tide come in. Maybe it'll bring someone in as it comes. Judgement coming in to visit, perhaps, from the sea. _

_I watch the boats. They speckle the horizon and I cannot make out the colour of their sails, or if there are any sails at all. Occasionally there are children. Sometimes I think I spy a hope, a sparkle in their eyes. They leave me alone, mostly, darting dangerously close to the foam that threatens to lick their feet each time it runs in to shore. _

_The waves are nothing but wind, you used to tell me. I try to remember that. I pray you are well._

* * *

Mornings are the worst. He always wakes with a jolt, plagued by a nagging sense of not being where he's supposed to be, yet not quite knowing where that is. What he did the night before, or where, or why, eludes him. He can only piece together from today's vestigial remains the plot of yesterday, and oftentimes the story is patchy at best, contradiction piled upon contradiction, nonsense syllables in a child's made-up song.

Like the woman in bed next to him with the painted face.

The whore, who to his horror, turns to him and leans in for a kiss. He tries feigning sleep, but she is completely unfazed and proceeds to nuzzle her face into his neck. He fights another wave of nausea, mumbles something about needing the bathroom, and escapes.

On his way out, Finlay toys with the idea of cracking the woman's skull open with the pewter vase sitting on the bedside table, blood gurgling forth from the pretty golden brook of her blond hair. His hand twitches. He inhales, and turns away.

* * *

The men call him uncle. It's Thorlby's fault; it was he who had somehow teased out the fact that Finlay was a good six years older than most of them (more than half a decade!, the boy had complained, and the way he speaks, besides! Thorlby straightened his back and cleared his throat, before droning in a baritone as deep as his reedy voice would allow, _We are soldiers, in service of the-_which earned him a well-deserved thwack on the head, that boy) and the name had caught on faster than he could wave it off. Finlay shrugs, wrinkling his face in disdain every time they holler, _Uncle!_, _Uncle Finlay!_, yet privately he thinks he kind of likes it. For these are the only things he knows: capitalised truths running the mill from Fealty to Honour to Courage and finally stopping at Vengeance, which he knows now, intimately, a soldier's duty, a captain's rank, ideals that have begun to reek from misuse. He shakes his head.

A captain must know his men. Not just match a name to a face, but to know each soldier, his habits and his shortfalls, how much more to push each one to fulfil his individual potential, how much slack to cut him when he is having a bad day and should be pressed no further. When to excuse a passing jest and when to punish misdemeanour that's truly meant. Which mission to assign to whom. Whose talent to tap on and when. Who's bravest in the field. He prides himself on knowing all that but as it turns out, he's sorely wrong.

Meek bespectacled Lomax, who puts everyone to sleep with his dissertations on railways and geographical landmarks and South-East Asia historical accounts, who's so slight the wind might just knock him over, steps forward and takes the fall. And even if the germ of constructing the radio had originated from Lomax, it was Finlay who had urged it to fruition. So it seems there is something terribly wrong about the way the boy sets his glasses on the table before the accursed radio. The way his throat bobs up and down as he swallows. Something terrifyingly wrong that he as their leader needs to avert or set aright.

But he does nothing. The truncheon falls. Lomax's legs buckles from beneath him as Finlay watches. No one moves. He should be the one lying there. Only he isn't. He's standing by the side, watching. Something's off. There's no sound. Lomax is screaming with each blow, his mouth wrenched open. The ground is bloody. There is no sound.

He keeps thinking, he should be the one there being hit. He's a coward. Someone should do something. He's the captain of these men; _he_ should do something. But no one moves. He stares and stares, too terrified to tear his eyes away. He imagines the sickening sensation of wood against bone. Lomax's arms are no longer shielding his face. The guard flings the truncheon across the square. It crashes into the side of a tent and rolls away. Lomax has stopped struggling. There is no sound.

* * *

Finlay stands at the door of the grocer's and makes a list in his head of what he needs to get before marching in, his shoulders set deliberately against conversation.

Vegetable selection brings him side by side with a woman with a stroller. The young lady looks up at him and smiles guilelessly, chatters on about the weather, the different dishes which the kind of tomatoes she is selecting is perfect for. The baby in the stroller gurgles and reaches out for the toy fan fastened to the side of the stroller. She turns to him, her face a pretty question mark. She must have asked him a question. The baby has given up and is now intent on stuffing his feet into his mouth. The miniature fan beats and twirls. His heartbeat quickens. She places her hand on his arm and he jerks it away. He regrets that movement immensely. She looks alarmed. He shakes his head, apologises. The baby mimics him. She blinks. He says something that must have been acceptable because she has gratefully returned to the sacred task of choosing tomatoes.

As he backs away he thinks he should never have gone out. Now he'll turn whatever he had said over and over in his head. Was it correctly phrased? Was it polite? Was it appropriate? He looks around. No one seems surprised to see him there, an old man shopping for groceries. He is perfectly in place. But he feels like a man at war.

* * *

The men outside the tent shuffle their feet and shoot each other nervous looks.

Inside, Finlay is caught in an altercation with the young Japanese officer. Knowing that sympathy is out of the question, he offers reason, look at him, the boy knows nothing. He can give you nothing. It is refused. He stands between the bed and the guard, who raises his baton and mutters a warning. Desperate, he offers himself, take me instead, I am the captain of these men and I can give you what you want. They push him aside. As a last resort he offers his fist to the slender jaw of the guard. They are locked in a struggle and he loses his footing and curses, catching his head on the sharp edge of the rack on which Lomax is lying. He stirs and moans.

It's too late. They have taken Lomax away, bound up his wrists and tied them to the back of the buggy like a dog, running blindly to god-knows-where, his glasses balanced on his bump of a broken nose as he half-staggers, half-runs out of the camp.

Finlay stumbles after him out of the tent but has not the heart to look. He turns and the ground finds him and he heaves, throws up nothing. He pounds the floor with his fist, rests his forehead on sand so marbled with clay it appears red. He is mad. They are all mad.

The other men avert their eyes and act like they have seen nothing.

* * *

The trip home is uneventful, apart from someone who offers him a seat on the bus. He declines, preferring to stand, one arm on the handrail and the other around the large brown paper bag that carries his week's supply of food.

He gets home and puts the things away. Fridge, pantry, summer wind. It is important that things go where they belong. He sits at the table, sorting through the mail. This month's meeting is pushed forward a couple of days, because Evans has a medical appointment on the usual date. He marks it on the calendar. It's seventeen days from today. He counts seventeen breakfasts, seventeen lunches and seventeen dinners. Fifty-one coffees, a hundred and two pills and two hundred and four swills from his pocket flask before they number off again, jack, queen, king and ace.

And Eric might come or he might not, he might sit quietly in a corner poring over a train schedule or he might not, he might nurse an extra pint or he might not. But Finlay will be there. He is resolved. He always tells himself, this time's the last, he will go home, swallow a handful of those pills and wash it down with whiskey, a series of motions he has imagined himself executing countless times. It is, after all, far easier than many of the things he has done. But a part of him longs to see those shadows of faces one more time, and another, and another, false assurances that the boys are coping well in the battlefield, and lo, forty years have passed just so, and they are no longer boys but men bearing the aches and ailments reserved only for the old and the decrepit.

He thinks about how they may appear to the outside world, a group of aged veterans, not dying quickly enough to justify their names on the welfare register. Honour is a relic of the past. He had forsaken that when he stood by and did nothing, his legacy empty but for a swallowed rage against his own dastardly inertia, such that death by his own hands was the only way to salvage his worth as a soldier. Isn't that exactly what those Japanese devils had said? He chuckles. How ironic it is that at the end of it all he judges himself by the honour code of the enemy. But treason or no, to die would be for once to finally finish something. It would be accomplished with an understated flourish and obliterate from this world a blight that should never have been, and it would remove from the mirror the face he no longer recognises as his own, one last selfishness to be indulged before love, for that he does, he loves his men more than his life is worth.

* * *

It is in no way how a captain should have carried himself. But the title itself had been so leached of meaning, so stripped of its last shreds of valour and dignity that he had become a man unnamed, unmoored and adrift.

Finlay did not expect him to return. And as if to honour that, when the Japanese threw his lifeless body back into the truck as one might a sack of flour, he became Eric. No more Lomax, my friend, Lomax, mate, give it here, but a younger brother to watch over and protect just a little more closely than the others.

Fingers against the feather of a pulse on Eric's neck, and the rising bile of indignation at the back of his throat, bitten down, always bitten down, and Eric lying prostrate in the back of a pick-up between his knees, the other men's eyes so glazed over with disease and despair that they barely recognise their fellow comrade. He doesn't know if he should be glad that Eric's alive.

As the truck pulls away, he clenches his jaw tight against solace and brands into his mind the face of the guard, his thin slit-like eyes, his flawless bearing, anything at all that may serve as a buoy in these waters. For the first time in weeks he thinks of the future, of scores unsettled, and wants to live.

* * *

He watches and waits. There are a pair of lovers walking hand in hand along the beach. Her sandals dangle from her fingers. The umbrella gets blown out of his hand by a gust of wind, its canvas inverted on its spindly metal frame, rocketing up into the sky like an air-borne mushroom. She squeals and runs after it, he hot on her heels and for a moment forgetting everything but the wind in his face like a kiss, like a ghost. He falls on his knees. The world looms and leers. She holds his face. He's crying, can't explain why, can't stop, can't breathe. It's a scene he's revisited a thousand times. Doesn't every couple have a walk by the beach kept for posterity?

Finlay remembers how he went home that evening and wrote a letter to his intended, calling off their engagement. They were to be married in the fall. Then he packed his things and moved to another city, cherry-picking bits of his past to carry along and leaving the rest behind which haunted his steps anyway. Back in the day you could fall off the grid, nameless and placeless, the players in your past no more than influential ghosts waiting in the wings.

They all achieve some semblance of normalcy. They work, they eat, they succumb to everyday illnesses like the flu and stand in line at the clinic just like everybody else. He carves up his day into hour-long periods each with its defined activity and advises the others to do the same so they wouldn't be caught thinking about what they're doing. The devil's in the thinking, he tells you, every time.

* * *

Life at the camp slips back into routine. An additional ration of food, another place in the line.

They fall in in the morning, they work, they do as they're told. They eat when they're allowed. The days pass, unnumbered and uneventful. In the beginning, the passing of the first of them was mourned deeply. Later, death visits so frequently it seems childish to mark it, like being amazed at the dawn, or stunned by nightfall, or grateful for the guard who comes over to their tent and barks a series of harsh syllables at Eric, who screams in his sleep. Yells at him to shut up like it's nothing.

Finlay presses his hand over Eric's face and the warmth from his parted lips hits his palm and twists his gut. He holds him down by the shoulders and the boy quiets.

The guard retreats. The night hums on.

* * *

It's three in the afternoon. His head is in the bathroom sink. He wonders how it got there.

* * *

Finlay forgets himself. He grows reckless. He saunters, he argues back. Doesn't matter what he's blabbering about, so long as he earns a cudgel to his back, his knees to the sand. The pain, when it comes, is bliss.

He rises, draws himself up to his full height. Even after months of deprivation and forced labour he's proud to say his emaciated form is sort of imposing. Anyway, he stands a full head taller than the guard. That's got to count for something, right? Saliva freckles his neck as the little man spews forth string after string of guttural insult, or whatever it is he is saying. His cheek stings. He thinks he just got slapped. Like a girl. Because he is not enough of a man to be dealt a punch to the jaw. That, unfortunately, rings very true. Tears rise in his eyes. He's got a good mind to spit on the stupid guard's face. Decorate it with a little yours truly. In fact, it'll land just nicely on his little head. That'd be a sight. He laughs, gathers spit, makes a fist-

"Sir."

It's the first word Eric's spoken in the weeks since he returned.

"What?" Finlay hisses. He can scarcely hear him with the blood pounding in his ears.

Eric whispers, barely audible, "Don't."

And then those childlike fingers on his wrist, urging caution, concern, and he feels like the wind's been knocked out of him, his wrist manacled by those fingers he had so carefully splintered and swathed in bandages before they were broken anew, and he turns his face away lest they should see him weep.

Withins is dead, he thinks, and Eric is broken, and here he is, for shame, a child to chiding.

* * *

After a while, it becomes the only thing you own, your past as a prisoner-of-war, its attendant shame and guilt for surviving your sole possession. It becomes a secret you barter at gatherings, a cheap trade in exchange for somebody to hold. He can see it now, the detesting sight of prospective girlfriends or the wives of the men hanging on their every word, women who sob politely and offer unasked-for sympathies, emitting low murmurs of understanding as appropriate punctuation for their stories. He scoffs. What do they know, the women?

The pain is theirs to bear and theirs alone. For what else is their fraternity built upon but pain, insular and unceasing, but still exalted in because it is wholly theirs. It can only be justified by silence. That which cannot be encompassed by words must be honoured in silence. Yet silence does not groan, does not bleed or splinter or cry out, and hence hardly validates what they have been through. But it is all there is, and all they will ever inherit.

He does not want to be happy. He does not want peace. Peace would make a mockery of all that they have suffered. Forgiveness would erase their experience from collective memory. He wants to be bitter, to hold on to hate, its vitriolic intensity his only reality in a post-war world. He figures if he stays angry long enough he may actually find something that needs to be avenged.

After dinner, Finlay folds the yellowed newspaper cutting into a neat square and tucks it into his briefcase. He'll find Eric first thing tomorrow morning.

* * *

That morning, the officer tips the tureen over just for the sheer heck of it. Their day's only meal meanders its way down the slope and makes a lake of the mess area. Thorlby intervenes, and has his knuckles ground underfoot.

After dark, a figure slips out of the tent in the officers' quarters. Keeping an eye on his superiors, he _pssts_ under his breath and motions to Finlay, pointing discreetly to the porridge left over from the officers' portion.

It takes a while before he understands what the Japanese soldier is actually doing. Nobody has noticed him but Finlay. They could do it quietly. Nobody would know.

The Japanese soldier beckons to him once more, waving his hand to indicate that they should hurry. Finlay swallows. Inside the tent, Thorlby chokes down a laugh as his dressing is changed. Beads of sweat dot his forehead. Finally, Finlay settles for glaring at the soldier before looking away. He does not need their pity. The malnourished frames of the men sharing the tent with him do cross his mind briefly, but to live, to die, all pales to nothing in the light of revenge. He will not allow any of them to assuage their guilt. A half-eaten pot of porridge is no worthy penance. Any acknowledgement of goodness on the enemy's part would soften his resolve.

The young Japanese soldier stares at him, bewildered. He shakes his head in disbelief as he walks away slowly back to his own tent. Finlay lays back down and counts the hours till the sun rises.

* * *

The sun peeks at him from the horizon.

Finlay is sitting on the beach. He's been here for quite a while. The sea, it seems, has washed up many things. His pride, his sins, the containers in which they were shipped to Burma. Beside him the sand shifts. A pair of worn brown leather shoes.

"Uncle,"

"You're late."

"The train was late. The captain, there was-"

"And Patti?"

"She's fine. Doting grandmother. You know."

And he reaches down to grab Eric's thin forearm, how very young the men are, he thinks, how very young they _all_ are again, and pulls him up the train, and once more unto the breach, dear friend, once more, only this time, make no mistake, he's taking the fall.


End file.
